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There are fewer outstanding Negro leaders on the national scene today than ever before. Negro leaders have found that, as their people's status improves, the business of leadership gets tougher. Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, recalls that back in the days when there were three or four lynchings a year, it was a lot easier to raise funds than now. A great Negro leader, the late James Weldon Johnson, once said that leadership was a form of escape; by this he meant that "Negro spokesmen" might gain a lot of prestige by making speeches and gathering personal followings, but did not really accomplish very much. Today's Negro leader concentrates on getting things done on specific issues. Emancipated to a large extent from the white professional liberals and their pet slogan, "education," he tries, for instance, to get a court ruling on segregation in Pullmans instead of trying to "educate" millions of individual Pullman passengers. Today's Negro leader does not want to be known as a firebrand; the compliment he prizes most is to be called "a good tactician." One symptom of this change is the fact that Booker T. Washington, a superb tactician whom most Negro leaders in the '20s and '30s denounced as an "Uncle Tom," is being rediscovered by Negroes as a great man.
The Negro still cannot forget his 'color. Negro writers and artists wish that they could be craftsmen first and Negroes second, but they find it virtually impossible. Yet more & more Negroes are impatient with spirituals and the blues (including the literary form of the blues, also known as the novel of protest). Many intelligent Negroes are plainly eager to stop looking at every problem through colored glasses. One interesting symptom: Negroes used to have a kind of secret slang— which, as one Negro writer puts it, was "like a tattoo on your wrist"; it has now all but disappeared. Says Negro Photographer Gordon Parks: "There is this pressure to make good for your whole people. If you fail, they give you a black eye. But a while back, I made up my mind, from now on it's just going to be me. If I want to fail, that's my business. You can't walk around with your race piled on your back." He adds thoughtfully, with the persistent doubt that even the most optimistic Negro seems unable to escape: "Anyway, that's what I tell my kids. Maybe I'm just bluffing myself."
Indications are that, as the Negro shares the white man's privileges and opportunities, he also shares his headaches. Sa,ys a Negro newspaperman: "When the Negro had less freedom, he could blame the whites for whatever went wrong with him. Now it's harder for him to blame the whites for his failures." Says Negro Novelist Ralph (Invisible Man) Ellison: "After a man makes $10,000 or $20,000 a year, the magic fades. He is just another man with his problems." Most Negroes still wish they had that kind of problem, but many will agree with Ellison that "we are all Americans together, all modern men together. And we're all facing the same spiritual crisis."
Perhaps the Negro's most serious problem is that, as